Hi Everyone Last weekend FOSDEM was held in Brussels so wanted to post a quick update.
FOSDEM weather is generally quite predictable (read that as bad!) and this time as well as rain, it snowed! Yet even with the bad weather, thousands of people made the effort to attend. Daniel flew in with our swag collection, I brought the banner and stickers. Normally we are on the first floor but this time we were located on the ground flow at the end of the row around from the reception. We arrived early on Saturday morning to setup the booth, and although things officially started at 10am, we had a crowd a few people deep, around the booth from 9.30am onwards ready to talk to us (or maybe they had seen our wonderful swag which included some very nice warm fleece hats :-) As well as the stickers and swag we also had a chrome book available for project demos and on Sunday we used it to run the video about Apache statistics. This was really useful for looking up project details and showing people where to get additional information. Our new location also meant that we had a lot of foot traffic and thanks to our booth volunteers, we managed to laugh, talk, joke and well as inform a lot more people about Apache, and Apache projects. We had queries ranging from incubator to how to foundation itself works. For the last couple of years, people had always been asking for Cassandra stickers so this time we had some – so this is when all the people wanting other stickers appeared and this years top request was Kafka followed by Commons and even Thrift! I told people that if we printed stickers for every single Apache project – the booth table would collapse! It was good to see a few projects represented at the booth – these included Beam, Httpd, Tomcat, Fineract, OFBiz, Kibble and Jena (Sorry if I’ve missed any!) and there were also a few Apache related talks on the schedule. Being at FOSDEM is great for outreach as well as the visibility of the Foundation and as a result we have been invited to participate at even more events. I’d really like to thank everyone that was involved in helping out to make the event a success. Special mentions go out to the “swagman Daniel”, Rich, Claude, Lars, Jean-Frederic, Gris and Myrle! One thing we did start was the idea of getting people to ‘buy the ASF a coffee’ or ‘buy the ASF a beer’ to get people to think about donating 2 – 5 euro especially if any of the ASF projects had helped them in someway. This potentially could be something to look into for next time. By the way – I was hoarse from talking by the time I got back home! Looking forward to doing it all again next year if we get the chance. I'm happy to hear about any other FOSDEM experiences, feedback, thoughts, comments. Thanks Sharan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
